Operation Ezra: The Iraqi Holocaust That Never Happened
The incredible story of two undercover El Al Pilots and the rescue of a young Jewish mother and her two children fleeing Iraq.
Lou Lenart was late.
2005On a windy afternoon in February of 2005, I found myself waiting for Lou Lenart in the lobby of the Casa Del Mar hotel on Santa Monica Beach. I figured we would spend 30 minutes chatting about this and that, and be on my way. This was our first meeting. Lou was a 84-year-old filmmaker and I was the publisher of Forbes Magazine. He was a player, but frankly, I had no idea what he wanted. Worse, he was 30 minutes late.
But as I would learn, good things happened when Lou was behind schedule.
Three months earlier, Lenart tracked me down through the Israeli Air Force attach, an IDF general, based in in Washington D.C. He told me Lenart had a story I should hear. It had been a secret for a long time.
For some reason I did not understand, I was the guy he wanted to tell it to.
The chances that our paths would cross were slim. Lou was a Los Angeles movie producer and an ex Israeli war hero. Netflix made a film of his adventures produced by Steven Spielberg’s sister Nancy, Above and Beyond. Everything about his story was out there.
Nearly everything.
I stood in the lobby waiting. That was when I realized I didn’t know what Lou looked like. My father, Al Cunningham, never mentioned him or that they had flown for El Al, and also neglected to mention that the two of them flew the Baghdad Airlift that saved the lives of roughly 140,000 Iraqi Jews. I had zero idea of why I was here.
You do these things for your father, I said to myself.
1951The mission was called Operation Ezra, a rescue of the 140,000 Iraqi Jewish community from persecution in Iraq in 1951. It was going to be a second Holocaust. The name Ezra is taken from the period in which the Jews of Babylon returned to Israel in the 5th century BC.
Nearly 2500 years later, there was no way to return, which became a big problem. Lou and Al (as I will refer to my father) would follow the same biblical script except they were flying used WWII C46’s, and had to fly the most dangerous mission in a lifetime of hazardous missions. It was a day that could have ended tragically — not just for Lou and Al, but for the Iraqi Jews trying to escape. This was the substance of Lou’s secret, one that he revealed his secret to anyone, not even Spielberg.
So this is Lou’s story. My father’s too, and in that respect, I guess it’s mine as well.
1916Allen H. Cunningham (my father, in his El Al uniform below) was born in Corpus Christi and grew up doing the two things he loved most, swimming and flying airplanes. Apparently, the one thing he didn’t enjoy was going to church, although he became a dive instructor at Baylor University, a Baptist college located in his hometown. He took flying lessons (think of planes as the iPhone of its time) and from there he began to barnstorm (the term meant they would fly over barns and watch as chickens ran scattering, have never heard nor seen a plane before). He flew with aviation celebrities like Chuck Yeager, the Elon Musk of his day, the character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff.
Like most young men of his era, Al volunteered during WWII, and the Air Force sent him to flight school. His assignment was to fly ‘the hump’ better known as the Himalayas from India to China, fortifying Chinese troops fighting against Japan. Years later, we ate Indian and Chinese food once a week at home and I never bothered to ask why. Children, right?
The war ended. Some of the leftover bits in the Middle East weren’t quite through however. On May 14, 1948, President Truman recognized Israel’s statehood. This act allowed U.S. pilots to volunteer to help the new Israeli Air Force teach Israelis to fly. Al and Lou were part of what would be called the “Machal,” or American and British pilots who flew for Israel in the 1948 War of Independence. As the county was about to go to war against five Arab nations, their role turned out to be slightly dangerous.
While serving in the Israeli Air Force, Al met my mother — a Jewish immigrant from a Russia who moved to Israel to escape persecution in 1919. She served as a telephone operator in the British Army during the Mandate period, and when Israel became a country, they got married. A Jewish wife and Baptist husband may not have been everyone’s idea of a great match, especially Mr. Gertzovsky, my mother’s father, but in time they all warmed up to the idea. It may have helped that Al was a great cook and made southern fried chicken (the Russians only knew how to boil them). Al joined El Al as one of its first pilots, where he frequently flew Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion.
1921Lou Lenart was born in Hungary, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was 10. As a teenager, he took a Charles Atlas course to knock the hell out of antisemitic gangs.
If you knew Lou you kind of felt sorry for them.
Lou joined the Marines, enrolled in flight school, and served with distinction in the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, he learned that 14 of his relatives had died in Auschwitz. Lou was not one to let a slight go unnoticed. He volunteered for the Israeli Air Force.
Not long after Lou arrived in Israel, the Egyptian Army was headed to Tel Aviv to strike a blow at the heart of the new country. Lou and three wingmen went to the skies in their Czech airplanes, constructed with salvaged parts.
The shock that Israel had an Air Force so intimidated the Egyptians they fled the battlefield, and Tel Aviv was spared an air bombardment.
He was forever known as “the man who saved Tel Aviv.” Now he was about to accomplish the feat a second time.
Lou also joined El Al once the war ended, and that is where he met Al, his future co-pilot in the Baghdad Airlift.
1951Lou and Al got to know each other in the early days of the airline when it was like a small family. They remarked how different their personalities were. Lou was the Scottish Terrier, all energy and determination. Al was more of a Sheepdog, carefully watching and ensuring the flock was in place.
Lou flew fighter jets; Al flew big transports. They fell in love it seems, over their differences.
Within a year, they had signed up to help the country solve a humanitarian disaster breaking out in Iraq. One of Judaism’s oldest communities in Baghdad faced mass extermination. To Israel, it all sounded too familiar. It was called Operation Ezra, but they knew it as the Baghdad Airlift because that was the mission.
The catalyst for Operation Ezra occurred in 1951 when the Iraqi government finally permitted Jewish emigrants to leave. But there was a catch. The Iraqi Jews could not fly to Israel (no Arab government could be seen adding to the country’s Jewish population at that time). The second was that anyone leaving had to leave all personal property and businesses behind. So far so good.
There would be one more rule, as they soon found out.
If the Iraqis learned the airlift was bringing Jews to Israel, they would shut it down. The other reality is that the pilots would be hung as spies.
Operation Ezra
El Al began flying refugees from Baghdad bound for Tel Aviv in mid-May 1951.
C46 They flew McDonnell Douglas transports which became a famous civilian airliner called the DC7. That was convenient because it was the same plane Al and Lou flew in WWII. Although people were piled like cattle in a boxcar, the war surplus aircraft could not accommodate more than 147 passengers. The Iraqis suspected the passengers night riot to get on the plane, and that might lead to a delay in takeoff or an accident. They didn’t want any publicity, either. The Iraqis wanted the Jews gone and quietly. That was why the flight plan was set for Cyprus, and the aircraft was retrofitted to look like an ordinary charter outfit called Near East Transport Company.
This was pure cloak and dagger. If Iraqi Arabs learned the airlift was bringing Jews to Tel Aviv, they would see it as supporting the new state of Israel, which could lead to an overthrow of the Iraqi government. The other thing that weighed on Lou and Al’s minds, they would be treated as spies and hung.
As Samuel Johnson once said, “”Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Lou stopped the story for a moment to get my reaction. My mouth was wide open, as you can imagine. “Please continue, before I lose my mind,” I said.
“We flew two flights per day roundtrip, nonstop. Our plane took off from Lod Airport in Tel Aviv for Baghdad for the outbound portion. When we arrived in Baghdad, we parked on the tarmac while the passengers boarded. Then, one of us would watch for terrorists because there was always the threat someone would place a bomb on board while we took turns using the bathroom.”
On this flight, it was Lou’s turn to go to the head. That turned out to be a stroke of luck, as he related.
Lou told me, “I was heading back to the plane. Then I saw something I could not believe. A mother and her infant were on the line with her 10-year-old boy. But the mother had just passed the guard. She was number 147, the limit the plane could carry. The guard said to get on the plane and leave the boy behind. She knew what that meant. She would be separated from him — forever.”
Lou watched this scene unfold as he walked to the plane: “The guard was having none of it. He screamed at the mother to get on board. The mother begged. The guard warned her. She got down on her knees and grabbed the guard’s boots, begging him to let her son on. The guard raised his foot and kicked her so hard, the baby flew into mid-air.”
Mass hysteria started to break out. All the guards cocked their rifles. Everyone was on point. Any moment, a mass shooting was about to begin.
“For a second, I was back in the days when gangs of anti-Semitic thugs beat me. I had a short fuse. When I saw someone being abused I couldn’t handle it. I broke into a run. I said to myself, ‘when I get to that sonofabitch guard, I am going to teach him a lesson he won’t forget.’”
It would have been a lesson the world would never forget either.
As Lou revealed in Santa Monica, “my temper, not to mention my attacking a guard, would have aroused their suspicions just a little. They thought we were hired hands and charter pilots aren’t supposed to care about their payloads. Certainly not enough to attack an armed guard.”
Lou said his fury was such that “the Iraqis would have interrogated us, and for good measure, tortured us. Of course, we would have told them everything — the El Al planes, that we were Jews flying Jews to settle in Israel, the whole shebang. Operation Ezra would shut down, and the passengers probably killed. The other 120,000 would be blacked out of history, God only knows.”
But on that day, for Lou and Al, time was on their side.
“As I was running I watched Al. He was standing right next to the guard, and acting like it was an ordinary moment. He reaches into his pocket as if he was tipping a friendly doorman, and pulls out a $20 bill. He quietly slips it to the guard. The guard smiles, and puts his arms around Al.”
“Then Al bends down and picks up the screaming child.
Lou didn’t know what to expect. “Would all hell break loose? I felt sick to my stomach. Then Al puts on his biggest Texas smile, and in broken Arabic (they taught us a few phrases back in Israel), he says, ‘shukra,’ which means “we thank you.” The guard smiled and put his arm around Al’s shoulder like pals. Now the prick waves the sobbing mother onto the plane with her ten-year-old boy.” They were not only safe, they were saved. Lou and Al jumped into the cockpit and took off for Cyprus. Or Tel Aviv, but that’s only technical.
The main thing the mission with 148 passengers was on its way.
Operation Ezra was one of the most successful rescue operations ever attempted in history. Except for Lou’s secret, the entire mission was as smooth as flying a commercial airliner today.
Lou wanted me to know the personal story behind Operation Ezra before he died. He felt that the operation would have been exposed if it had not been, as Hemingway would call it, grace under pressure. If not for that, thousands of Iraqi Jews may never have made it to Israel, their ultimate fate unknown and unthinkable.
Lou’s story ended with the two of us hugging, and frankly, a bit emotional. In a life full of adventure, this stood out as one of the crowning moments when two humble pilots changed the fate of more than a hundred thousand people, a country, and perhaps the world.
2015After becoming a Hollywood filmmaker, producer of six feature films, and general manager of the Los Angeles Clippers in the early 1980s, Lou Lenart returned to Israel and died on July 20, 2015, in Ra’anana.
1994After retiring from El AL, Allen Cunningham moved back to Texas where he excelled at cooking, painting, and he referred to himself as a rancher (he owned one cow).
He died on May 22, 1994, in Waco.
Today in Israel, there is a 70 something year old male of Iraqi birth, who was 10 when he arrived in Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport in the very back seat of Lou’s and Al’s plane. I hope he is enjoying his country, his grandchildren and hopefully, a healthy life. He was able to leave Baghdad, along with 120,000 Iraqi Jews and families, because Lou and Al answered the call.
And because Al kept a spare $20 bill in his pocket.
(Author’s note: I don’t have a picture of Lou and Al together, unfortunately. They didn’t do selfies in those days.)
